Who is behind Kosmix?

Silicon Beat has an interesting read on Kosmix, a new search startup that was created by two of the founders of Junglee: Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan.

Those names may sound familiar to people in Seattle’s technology community as both Rajaraman and Harinarayan took top positions at Amazon.com in 1998 after they sold Junglee to the Internet retailer.

Apparently they left Amazon.com on good terms because Silicon Beat reports that Jeff Bezos participated in Kosmix’s seed round of funding. The post, which goes into great detail about their connections to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, also shares a tidbit about how Amazon.com approached Google about an acquisition in 1999.

Rajaraman recalls: “And we kind of asked, at that point, ‘Sergey, if Amazon were to buy you guys, what sort of price would you sell for?’ I remember Sergey telling me: ‘The only kind of price we’d accept would be something with ten digits [billions].’ If he’d said nine digits, we might have talked.”

Kosmix is not the only new startup tied to Junglee. Harinarayan is an angel investor in Webaroo, a Bellevue stealth startup that I wrote about in this story last year. Webaroo is led by Rakesh Mathur, the former CEO at Junglee.

Who is behind Kosmix?

Silicon Beat has an interesting read on Kosmix, a new search startup that was created by two of the founders of Junglee: Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan.

Those names may sound familiar to people in Seattle’s technology community as both Rajaraman and Harinarayan took top positions at Amazon.com in 1998 after they sold Junglee to the Internet retailer.

Apparently they left Amazon.com on good terms because Silicon Beat reports that Jeff Bezos participated in Kosmix’s seed round of funding. The post, which goes into great detail about their connections to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, also shares a tidbit about how Amazon.com approached Google about an acquisition in 1999.

Rajaraman recalls: “And we kind of asked, at that point, ‘Sergey, if Amazon were to buy you guys, what sort of price would you sell for?’ I remember Sergey telling me: ‘The only kind of price we’d accept would be something with ten digits [billions].’ If he’d said nine digits, we might have talked.”

Kosmix is not the only new startup tied to Junglee. Harinarayan is an angel investor in Webaroo, a Bellevue stealth startup that I wrote about in this story last year. Webaroo is led by Rakesh Mathur, the former CEO at Junglee.